An hour later Mrs. Haswell sat before the cheval glass of her
dressing-table. Her dark hair, loosened now from its coils, cascaded
abundantly over her white shoulders. She was thinking, and the
charmingly chiseled lips and brow here in the privacy of her own room
wore a rather calculating and somewhat satisfied smile. No note of
contrition or self-accusation marred their serenity. A knock on the door
interrupted her reverie and with a smothered exclamation of annoyance
she glanced at the clock and rose.
"May I come in a moment?" Her husband's voice was a shade thicker than
usual and his face still wore the somber expression which seemed so out
of place there.
"It's almost two o'clock, Len." There was an uninviting coolness in the
quality of Loraine's tone--almost a protest. "Won't tomorrow do?" She
stood still, holding the door only a few inches ajar.
"I won't keep you up long," he assured her.
"I'm very tired."
Len Haswell laid his hand on the knob and opened the door in spite of
her unwelcome. "If you please," he said quietly. He came in and lighted
a cigarette, then he inquired with an unaccustomed irony: "What tired
you, Loraine? You didn't seem to be dancing much."
His wife shrugged her shoulders. Beyond that she failed to reply.
The big man came over and took both her hands in his own with a
half-savage affection. "Loraine," he said pleadingly, "I wanted to dance
with you tonight. I searched high and low, but I couldn't find you. For
my part I have spent a very dreary evening."
"You know, Len," she casually reminded him, "you and I can't dance
together. I'm a fair dancer and you are a very good one, but together we
can't manage it. There were plenty of other girls, weren't there?"
The man's face for an instant worked spasmodically and in pain, then it
grew dark. "For me, Loraine, there is never any other girl. You know
that. Why do you avoid me as if I were a pestilence? Why can't you
sometimes be the girl you used to be? Presumably you married me because
you wanted to. You had better offers, richer lovers. Have I changed so
much in five years--and if not, what in God's name has changed you?"
She withdrew her hands from his and sat again in the chair before the
mirror. "Len," she said with a touch of petulance in her voice, "you get
into grouches and spur your imagination to all sorts of absurdities. I'm
very sleepy. Why can't you reserve your fault-finding until tomorrow?"
Len Haswell answered quietly, but obdurately. "For two reasons. In the
first place I sha'n't be able to sleep unless you answer me. In the
second place I shall probably see as much of you tomorrow as I have
today--which is nothing." His tone hardened. "You are too tired to give
me a few minutes, but you found it both possible and agreeable to give
Paul Burton the entire evening."
"Oh," she laughed easily and with well-simulated amusement, "I should
fancy from the contemptuous things I have heard you men say about Paul,
you would regard him as quite harmless."
"Paul!" repeated the man accusingly. "When did you begin calling him by
his first name? Does he call you Loraine, too?"
"Why not? We are friends." She looked up at her husband's face with an
air of injured innocence and he paced a turn or two across the floor
before he halted before her.
"I wish you would see less of him. I don't talk business to you often.
It bores you, but you know that we are always strained to hold the pace
that richer members of our set cut out. We have to pay very high for a
privilege which has no value to me except that you like it."
Loraine Haswell sighed--and masked a yawn behind a small uplifted hand.
"I wonder," she mused as though to herself, yet quite loud enough to be
heard, "why some men find it so hard to make money, and to others it
seems so easy."
Len Haswell flushed brick red to his cheekbones. He bit his lip and
forced himself to remain silent for a moment, then he spoke gently. "I'm
sorry I am not as brilliant a financier as some others. Nature doesn't
endow us all alike. A good many people would regard me as fairly
successful, I dare say. For myself a small house on the Sound would be
good enough, if you were there--"
"Thank you," she answered with deliberate cruelty, "I don't think I'd
care for that."
The man's scowl became ominously black. The hands at his side twitched,
and the temper with which few credited him because of his perpetual
control, flared out.
"No, by the Almighty, you would rather prefer to be where the gods of
life are pleasure and extravagance and selfish indulgence! Where the
loyal love of a husband means less than the flatteries of a tame
cat...." As suddenly as the eruption had come it subsided. He raised
both hands. "Forgive me," he implored, "I didn't mean that. But I am
distraught and financial affairs are very precarious, Loraine. We may
stand on the brink of a disastrous panic. It lies in Hamilton Burton's
power to make me or break me--absolutely. Don't you see what that
means?"
His wife shook her head, "I'm afraid I don't understand the intricacies
of finance." Her tone added that neither was she extravagantly
interested in them.
"It means this," Haswell spoke gravely. "You have been seen with Paul
Burton more perhaps than is advisable. Paul Burton is Hamilton Burton's
brother ... he is the one man with whom I can't afford to quarrel."
"I haven't suggested your quarreling with him."
"Then please don't drive me to it."
"Again I say that you are letting your imagination make you the victim
of absurdities. Of just what are you accusing me?"
He came over and took her hand. "I am not accusing you of anything. I am
willing to let my honor rest in your hands, but I am warning you against
innocent mistakes."
He sought to put an arm about her, but she slipped from his grasp, and
after a moment he said "Good-night" with a sort of sullen resignation,
and went out, closing the door noiselessly after him.
* * * * *
Jefferson Edwardes had tramped far. When Mary Burton had gone to her
own room, he had plunged into the thicketed slopes of the hills and
walked for hours. Since his long exile in the White Mountains he had
always held to the idea that a man can think more clearly close to the
rocks and under open skies. Just now he wanted an untinged clarity to
attend his thoughts.
Although the occurrences of the evening had possessed an Arabian Night's
quality of unreality, he felt no misgivings for the love he had
announced and pledged. It was not as though he looked back on a record
of broken promises. He had no troubling memories to sweep from his
conscience before his heart should be clear for a new entry. He had come
away from the mountains with something hermit-like in his nature and
much of the idealistic. It had been a pleasanter thing to him to keep
unsullied the more important dreams of life than to endanger them with
the transitory pleasures of the philanderer. The Mary Burton he had
known in the dilapidated farm-house had of course been nothing more than
a picturesque little waif of the country-side. Yet she had been a memory
that remained distinct through years in New York and Russia; a memory
which his imagination had quickened into life. Of Hamilton's spectacular
successes his world of banking and finance had given him cognizance, but
only such interest as one accedes to matters of impersonal news.
So a curiosity had arisen in his mind to see this young woman to whom he
had once played the fairy prince, and since he was a whimsical man, that
curiosity had woven and twisted itself into a dream. A dream long
entertained may become something more than a dream. Perhaps it may be a
menace. About their meeting tonight had been so much of the fortuitous
that he might regard the whole affair as one operated from the knees of
the gods--and disclaim responsibility.
The house windows had darkened one by one by the time his tramp ended
again at Haverly Lodge. The moon was near the western timber fringe of
the mountains, but Mary Burton, still wide-eyed and wakeful, had slipped
out of her room to the balcony by her window.
The stone coping where she sat was partly black with shadow and partly
platinum gray with the last of the moonlight. Her hair, falling in two
heavy braids, caught the glistening light and her lips were parted in a
smile. "It is strange," she told herself, "that once before he came
along--and waked me into a new self. His second coming is stranger
still. It would almost seem that there is no chance about it. It would
almost seem that it has been definitely planned." Then she laughed low
to herself. "And if that's true I have no responsibility in the matter
at all. Nothing I do about it is my fault--and I needn't be very angry
about his kissing me before he was introduced to me."
Then she saw a figure leave the shadow of the hedges and cross the
moonlit lawn with a confident stride. Mary Burton leaned a little
forward, resting on her hands, and her lips remained parted.
"He seems just about as shameless about the whole affair as I am," she
reflected, and when he was directly below she accosted him in a careful
voice: "Halt, Restless Stranger. Does a disturbed conscience send you
out to wander in the night mists?"
Jefferson Edwardes obeyed the command and raised his eyes to the
commanding voice. "Perhaps," he announced in a guarded tone, "it is, in
a fashion, dread of the wrath to come--though my conscience is clear.
But you"--in his half-whisper she caught an eager note of hope--"why
aren't you asleep?" She shook her head and in the moon-bath her face
flashed into a luminous smile. "I am working up that wrath," she assured
him. "I am preparing to be terribly angry with you tomorrow."
"And until tomorrow?"
"Until tomorrow I am very happy. Good-night."
"Tomorrow is always--tomorrow, dearest--" he said, "Good-night."
* * * * *
A many-sided man was J.J. Malone, with a nature as brilliant and as
capable of flashing varying lights from its facets as a diamond--and
when need be as hard as a diamond. Had he lived in feudal times other
barons would have said, "Where Malone sits there is the head of the
table," and the monarch himself would have taken thought before
provoking his wrath. In these days of alleged intolerance for tyrants he
dispensed with the fanfare of trumpets and the tossing of flambeaux. The
door of his office in a gray shaft-like building down-town bore the
simple inscription, "American Transportation Co., President's Office."
Many men to whom the mighty money leverage of "Consolidated" was a
familiar story had heard of J.J. Malone only in the casual sense. Yet
the oligarchy had been built and rendered, supposedly, impregnable from
the conceptions of his constructive brain. Concentration of power into
one vast unit had been "Consolidated's" triumph--and his realized dream.
Always the master tactician had been he who unobtrusively wore the title
of president of "American Transportation." To others he had relinquished
title rôles, but, unseen, he had set and managed the stage. Hamilton
Burton had been taught at Malone's knee, but Hamilton Burton was young
and hot with vitality, aflame with ambition. From Malone himself he had
absorbed the principle, "Never forget that today's ally may be
tomorrow's enemy. Be prepared to use him--or crush him." In secret
Burton had been building to that end, and only he himself knew the full
reserve force of his resources.
"You are about the only man in the Street, sir," declared young Bristoll
one morning, in a burst of admiration, as he and his chief sat together
over their coffee, "to whom J.J. Malone seems willing to grant an
equality of status."
Hamilton Burton smiled.
"That is true just now, Carl," he replied. "It can not always remain
true."
"Why?"
"Our young Minister of Finance sees the present in just proportions,"
laughed Burton. "But his vision has not yet mastered the horizons of the
future."
Carl flushed. He knew that for all the flattering confidence to which he
was admitted, many broadly conceived pictures moved across the screen of
his employer's mind of which he was vouchsafed no intimation.
"I'll elucidate, Carl, though it's scarcely a matter for advertisement,"
went on the other. "Hasn't it occurred to you that Malone and I started
life in very similar fashion? Each of us came raw and uninitiated from
the country. Each of us brought rugged physiques and fairly alert minds
to our tasks. Each of us has, I think, been fairly successful." Hamilton
Burton paused to laugh frankly at his own modesty of expression.
"Each of us has been a little swifter than the generality in reading
signs; a little bolder in conception and execution. If you read the
papers you will gather that each of us is, in private life, impeccable,
and each of us is, in business, as merciless as an epidemic."
"That is the voice of envy," protested the younger man with heat.
"Thank you. I am grateful for the acquittal. There is room for only one
absolute master. Only one side of a coin can lie face up at the same
time. Heads or tails must be turned down."
To the front of Malone's mind a train of dispassionate logic had forced
a similar conviction. As between himself and this rising sun of finance
it was a matter of heads or tails. In consequence, on a certain June
afternoon his yacht, _Albatross_, cleared from its slip in the Hudson
and stood out toward midstream with her prow pointed toward the bay and
the narrows.
It was a sparkling day, warm enough to make the breeze agreeable as it
fanned the faces of the loungers on the white deck. J.J. Malone himself
was seemingly nothing more formidable than the unexcelled host. As he
leaned, bareheaded, on the rail of the forward deck the river breath
stirred his iron-gray hair and his changeful eyes were kindly and
atwinkle. Yet the party had not been wholly devised for purposes of
pleasuring. There were no ladies on board and only four men exclusive of
the crew. These four could swing directorates controlling the major
interests of Consolidated. For this twenty-four hours of cruising, one
had come down from Newport, one had delayed his sailing date to Europe
and the third, H.A. Harrison, had left the entertainment of his guests
at Haverly Lodge in the hands of others.
Dinner passed with no reference to business. Anecdote and repartee held
the right of way, but later when the myriad lights of lower Manhattan
glowed out like the fire-spray of a thousand arrested rockets, cigars
were lighted and the flanneled quartette settled back into their four
deck-chairs. Then it was that Harrison gave the cue with a terse
question: "Well, why are we here?" Instantly Malone's face altered.
"To consider a method for clipping Burton's claws," he announced with
decisive brevity.
"Why not let sleeping dogs lie?" The inquiry came thoughtfully from
Meegan of the Cosmopolitan Bank.
Malone's voice rang like steel on flint. "Gentlemen, this man is a
charlatan. As his power grows his menace increases. Consolidated has
never brooked disobedience nor insolence. It has been our policy to
reward the faithful servant and punish the unfaithful." He glanced
around the group, then continued in the manner of one issuing an edict.
"Heretofore we have not waited until the refractory child grew too big
to punish. We should not do so now."
"For my part," suggested Harrison with a quiet twinkle in his eyes, "I'm
just as willing to let someone else take this child out to the woodshed
now."
"Hamilton Burton is outgrowing restraint." Malone was snapping out his
words with categorical crispness. "Do you realize the perilous scope of
his dream? His overvaulting ambition looks to a one-man power of
finance; a power vested solely in himself. We are rearing a
Frankenstein, gentlemen. To overlook it means our ultimate ruin--and,
what is more, a national cataclysm."
"And yet," interposed Harrison quietly, "his power is largely of our
making. We took him to our hearts."
J.J. Malone admitted the statement with a grave nod.
"Up to the point where arrogance became a mania, he was a most valuable
lieutenant. I select men for efficiency. When they seek to become
usurpers, I endeavor to halt them."
The Honorable S.T. Browne, as general counsel for many Consolidated
interests, had evolved the theorem that from every statute there is an
escape. Now he inquired, "How did he gain his seat in the saddle?
Sudden, wasn't it?"
"He came into my office one day only a few years ago," answered the
chief baron. "Twice I refused to see him, but he meant to see me--and he
did. More than that, he fascinated me. I knew that I was talking with a
genius and a man of dauntless mind. Such minds I can use. I used his."
Meegan knocked the ash from his cigar and laughed. "Burton has a certain
hypnotic quality of address," he conceded.
"It is not address--it is genius. This man held me with his eye and
forced me to listen. He came with no apology and no misgiving. He knew
himself for a child of Destiny, and within ten minutes I knew it, too.
What is the biggest accomplishment, gentlemen, that stands to the credit
of Consolidated in the past ten years?"
"The merging of Inter-ocean Coal and Ore." Meegan gave the response
without hesitation, and no one contradicted him.
"That," asserted Malone, "was the wild scheme which Hamilton Burton
brought to me as his letter of introduction. I found no flaw in his
plan--aside from its stupendous audacity. You ask me why I put him in a
position of power. He rode in on his own usefulness--led by his
intrinsic self-faith."
"So far as you have gone," suggested Harrison drily, "you have
summarized several fairly solid reasons for keeping him with us."
"Quite true. I concede him a Napoleonic caliber and I recognize his
Napoleonic effrontery. His conscienceless lust for power has unbalanced
him. He seeks to sack the world. He must be stopped."
"So you suggest--?" Browne left his question unfinished save for the
interrogation of his lifted brows.
"He sits in seven of our directorates. You know how Consolidated has
sought to avoid the appearance of too narrow a domination. You know,
too, that we have avoided directors who were obviously pure dummies. For
several weeks I have been tracing out the holdings in Coal and Ore
stock. Hamilton Burton with his following looms too large. Left to his
own devices, he may outgrow control."
Meegan studied his cigar with attentively knit brows before he inquired:
"Does Burton assume such proportions in Coal and Ore as to suggest
turning the balance of control? Is that what you mean?"
"Not yet." Malone drew from his pocket a small note-book and consulted
its pages. "We hold a safe balance in our own hands, barring treachery,
but we have let him gain a stronger nucleus than now seems advisable.
You gentlemen know that we have always held out the impression that only
a small amount of Consolidated stock is offered the general public."
"As we also know," amended Harrison bluntly, "that in fact a large
proportion of it is in the hands of the casual investor. Still another
fact is sure. Burton's sobriquet of the Great Bear was not gratuitously
bestowed. If we read him out of meeting he will bring a panic about our
cars."
Malone puffed for a space at his cigar in silence. The quiet drone of
the engines came up from below, and the moonlight fell in a broad band
of radiance on the foaming ribbon of the wake.
"I have also considered that point," he said at last. "Burton has two
cardinal maxims of finance. One is that Securities are usually sold
above their intrinsic worth. The other is that Cash alone is an
absolutely stable form of property. Acting on these two principles, he
is doubtless building to the logical end. Some day he will make another
raid--and, if he is allowed to select the day and the conditions, it
will be a panic-making raid. If an enemy's attack is inevitable the best
defense is offense. There is no wisdom in giving him time to prepare.
Every day we stand idle his power grows. We must show enough strength at
the next meeting of our stock-holders to reorganize the Coal and Ore
directorate."
Harrison rose and walked to the rail. He stood for a moment looking out,
then came back and spoke quickly.
"If this is to be done we should let no more time slip by. It's a safe
bet that he isn't wasting days."
Malone's fist crashed down on the arm of his chair. He rose, too, and
paced backward and forward, talking as he walked.
"Waste time! By heaven, we must waste no minute. We must go after him
and bring in his pelt. We must treat him like a wolf prowling around our
sheep-folds. There can be no peace for any of us until he is destroyed
... and, damn him, I mean to see that it's done!"
The others watched the broad shoulders of the head baron and the
resolute carriage of the head, thrown back as if in challenge. He paused
once to relight the cigar which in his vehemence he had let die, and as
the match flared they saw that his eyes blazed and his features were set
in that wrath which the Street feared.
"By heaven," exclaimed Malone fiercely, "we've got to smash him--damn
him!"